The Bluetooth™ Enabled (BLE) protocol is one of the most popular communication technologies used in the Internet of Things (IoT) due to the explosive growth in the use of mobile devices (also denoted “controller devices” or “controllers” herein), most of which have BLE capabilities built-in. The growth in IoT devices (also denoted “actor devices” or “actors” herein) using BLE has largely been due to the available ecosystem and the relatively low cost of chipset technology. Today, most BLE-based IoT devices can be operated from a mobile device, such as a smart phone or tablet computing system. These mobile devices, in general, function as a BLE master or central device, with the IoT devices functioning as BLE slave or peripheral devices. This system implementation requires the mobile device to execute a BLE air interface protocol with the IoT device in order to establish a connection prior to sending one or more commands.
This requirement, however, becomes a problem when multiple mobile devices attempt to control the same IoT device. For example, the mobile device that makes the first connection with the IoT device will have control, and all other mobile devices have to wait until the first mobile device disconnects from the IoT device before they can connect to and control the IoT device. Most IoT devices are relatively low-cost and low-power devices, and do not support multiple connections from multiple BLE master devices simultaneously. Because of this, the IoT device will be blocked by the first mobile device that makes a connection with the IoT device. Unless that mobile device manually or automatically disconnects from the IoT device, no other mobile devices can control the IoT device.
Alternatively, the mobile device may only setup a connection with the IoT device every time it needs to send a command, after which the mobile device may disconnect, allowing other mobile devices to control the IoT device. In this case, the latency becomes unacceptable for most IoT devices as the connection setup time for BLE is typically in the order of a few seconds. For example, the delay of a few seconds in a light bulb being turned on by a smart phone would negatively impact the user's experience.
Also, as IoT applications become more widely adopted in the market, the typical home or office environments may have tens or hundreds of BLE devices. Most smart phones can maintain fewer than ten BLE connections simultaneously due to hardware or software limitations, and/or power consumption reasons. Maintaining constant connections with all IoT devices becomes impossible for such mobile devices and the connection setup latency would seriously impact user experience.
Therefore, it is not practical to use a connection-oriented scheme for IoT devices. Thus, an alternative technique to resolve these issues using a connectionless implementation, and additionally introducing data security methods to provide a high level of wireless network security that would otherwise be relatively easily compromised using BLE protocol alone, may be beneficial.